Military Personnel Issues at the Individual, Team and Organisational Level

The UK Armed Forces need to attract, select and retain personnel against a background of demographic and social change, and there is a need to conform to legislation impacting on equal opportunities, employment practices, human rights, a changing pattern of operational deployment and changes in equipment/technology.

The Haldane-Spearman Consortium is highly experienced in military Human Resources (HR) research, bringing together two world-class institutions with proven HR track records in the private and public sectors. With increasing legislation and other changes, the Armed Forces must consider best professional practice in industry and must benchmark their activities. We can provide quantitative evidence-based research based on a range of data collection methods, e.g. organisational surveys, postal, focus groups, one-to-one interviews and trials.

Innovative methods are required to meet the short term recruiting shortfall as well as to sustain recruitment in the long term. There is a need to obtain a broad understanding of the impact of demographic trends, changes in social attitudes, attitudes to work and values on the ability of the Armed Forces to meet recruitment targets. We are able to identify barriers to recruitment and aspects of a military career that are recruitment-positive or -negative, and can help the Armed Forces represent themselves optimally in marketing and advertising.

The Armed Forces need to ensure the best people are selected, in terms of ability to cope with skills and knowledge required of service personnel and robustness and ability to adapt to service life. They must establish that their selection processes adhere to best professional practice, are fair, and conform to employment legislation.

We can develop selection methods appropriate to changes in job requirements brought about by new technology and working practices, such as use of computer-based selection to assess more complex human abilities including decision making, and provide quantitative evaluation of different selection methods.
The overall aim is to manage retention to achieve a sustainable inflow, throughput and outflow of personnel.

Our research has identified factors that significantly impact on retention, e.g. conditions of service life, separation from family and friends and also the mechanism by which they influence an individual’s decision to leave. Such research has provided an evidence base to support personnel policy initiatives. In the MOD's Armed Forces Overarching Personnel Policy document, the need for a policy to manage the transition from Service to civilian life was recognised, and led to the creation of the Veterans Agency. We can undertake work addressing (a) obligations to those who have left the Service (e.g., social support such as obtaining new employment), and (b) support to those who have sustained physical or psychological injury, to support the formulation of appropriate policy initiatives.

A number of issues cut across HR areas. The welfare of service personnel and their dependants must be considered. Increasingly, legislation places legal requirements on employers to exercise duty of care, which extends to social policy as well as health and safety.
There is consequently a need for research that examines how conditions of service might be amended to take account of initiatives such as managing work-life balance and flexible working patterns, e.g. the need for career breaks for women taking maternity leave or people wishing to further their career in civilian employment.

We can provide research to identify how these aspirations can be met, individuals encouraged to return, and the overall process managed.